Indian Railways - Part 2 - The Zones & Divisions

 

In continuation to the previous post, this post will talk about how does IR make it possible to transport Goods & Passengers across the length and width of the country.

You must have come across letters like SECR or NR or SR, painted on the wagons and names like Tughlakabad, Erode, Itarsi, etc. on the locomotives. This article deals with the various Zones of IR.

Indian Railways divides its operations into zones which are further sub-divided into divisions, each having divisional HQs.      Each of the divisions is headed by a DRM (Divisional Railway Manager), who reports to the General Manager.

The entire IR network of the country is divided into 16 Zones namely:

1.      Northern Railways. (NR)

2.      North Eastern Railways. (NER)

3.      Northeast Frontier Railways. (NFR)

4.      Eastern Railways (ER)

5.      South Eastern Railways. (SER)

6.      South Central Railways. (SCR)

7.      Southern Railways. (SR)

8.      Central Railways. (CR)

9.      Western Railways. (WR)

10.   South Western Railways. (SWR)

11.   North Western Railways. (NWR)

12.   West Central Railways. (WCR)

13.   North Central Railways. (NCR)

14.   South East Central Railways (SECR)

15.   East Coast Railway (ECoR)

16.   East Central Railway (ECR)     

This division is done in order to manage the complex network. Each of these zones have their own engineering, maintenance and medical departments, which spring into action as and when required.

As the goods are booked at the outgoing station, all the information about the goods is collected and is transferred to the destination station and also to all the intermediate stations and zones. For example, if the coal mined at SECL (MP & CG) is to be transported to Neyveli Thermal Power Corporation (TN), the train will pass thru various zones and all the zones and divisions will have sufficient information as to which train is coming and which way it has to go. The decision on changing the line, or taking the train on loop line to pass a superfast passenger train however, lies with the Station In-charge.

Sometimes, special trains are also proposed by the central government for example a train carrying water from Erode to Kerala during the 2018 floods; for such trains, a special pass is given, and it is ensured that the train reaches the destination on time. It is the duty of all the zonal and division heads to ensure smooth operations of all these special trains without affecting the normal trains.

We have learnt the topic of Effective vs Responsiveness of Supply Chain and Logistics, and it was clear that a logistics network can either be Effective or Responsive, or a mix and match between the two, but having both at the extreme ends is not possible, but in the previous example of Water Train, we can see that since it was urgently required, the IR network was extremely responsive and it did not charge anything extra, and the normal train operations of the zones was not affected.